


Out of the Woods

by TheLionInMyBed



Series: Raised By Wolves [6]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Adventure, Elves, F/F, Fantasy, Gen, Goblin Adoption, Horror, Khazri just literally a cryptid in this one, Mystery, Werewolves, Wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23383921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLionInMyBed/pseuds/TheLionInMyBed
Summary: There’s something in the woods.It’s been years since Moire hung up her bow and put the hunt behind her, but when the wolf-gnawed bones of two trappers are found buried in a shallow grave, the village of Ashbrooke turns to her. She’s hunted wolves before and, one way or another, she’ll see this monster laid to rest.But when the trail leads her to a child, ragged and frightened, Moire hesitates and keeps hesitating even as the deaths don't stop. Is she protecting a victim or enabling a killer?
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Series: Raised By Wolves [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/393619
Comments: 20
Kudos: 38





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a while! Both since I last updated the series and since I started this story, all the way back in 2015. Whups! The story's complete, though, so expect the next update _very_ soon. Betas tell me this works as a stand-alone story, but it's also a direct sequel to [Every Man Is A Wolf To Other Men](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6229150), and reading that first will give a very different perspective.
> 
> Love, as always, to [June](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiveOakWithMoss), my beta, best friend, and partner in all crimes.

There was something in the woods.

The rumours started with the children, as such things often did. Scratchings at the walls and stories about a great dog that came in the night and whispered from the treeline in a man’s stolen voice. 

“Rats,” said their parents but didn’t argue if it made them go to bed without complaint. 

Then eggs began to vanish from the coops and milk from the churn. Chickens were snatched up and they found paw prints in the dirt and grey fur snagged on nails. Rent and rotted carcasses left at the treeline. 

“Wolf,” the villagers muttered over their ale and people made sure to lock their doors and keep their children from the woods. Moire the archer listened without comment. Wolves wouldn’t hunt humans by choice and the game wasn’t scarce enough to force them. 

“You could kill it,” Gianni said, sidling over to her table. “You killed the Leeford barghest, everybody knows-”

“That was a long time ago,” said Moire. “There are young folks looking to make a name for themselves. If the beast must die, I leave the hunt to them.” 

But then apples vanished from locked storerooms and clothes disappeared from the line. Yalli saw a shadow in her vegetable plot that walked on two legs and vanished into the forest when she went after it with an axe. Something took one of Olau’s goats and left its innards strewn about the barn.

“Changeling,” the elders said. “Púca,” and left bowls of bread and milk upon their stoops and iron above their doors. It worked; the offerings were taken and the thefts stopped. 

“I thought it was rabbits ruining my radishes,” Yalli told Moire over thin barley beer. “If anyone could track it down it’s you.”

“To what end?” Moire said. “If I went hunting after everyone who ever filched an apple, I’d have mounted the heads of half Ashbrooke’s children by now.”

Autumn turned towards winter and the hunters came down from their lodges to settle in for the cold. Most of them. 

Two did not and when the villagers sent a party out to the cabin they found bloodstains on the floor and wolf-gnawed bones in a shallow hole behind the house. 

“Skinchanger,” people whispered. “Werewolf.” 

It was not a surprise when they came to her door; Moire had already brought her bow down from the eaves where it had been meant to spend the winter. She was five and sixty but she still had all her wits, most of her teeth and one good fight left in her. 

Ilya frowned to see the weapon. She’d married Moire the archer, Moire the hunter, but that had been thirty years ago and it was a long time since her wife had gone after more than deer. 

“All this for a wolf?” she said. Ilya had been born in the university hospital in Port Ferris and believed in superstition and mass hysteria. “Even if it’s a maneater, it doesn’t need to be you.”

“They told me what they found at the cabin,” Moire replied, she who had been born beneath the canopy and never went outside without her socks turned inside out and her pockets full of salt. “Wolf hair in the beds and footprints in the mud. A _child’s_ footprints. Something killed them and then nested there.”

“You said the barghest would be the last.”

“I did,” Moire said, checking her quiver. “But better me than some overeager young clod with something to prove. At least I _know_ how foolish this is.”

She was prepared for more of an argument but Ilya picked up her shuttle and turned to her loom saying, “I see I shan’t dissuade you. Dinner will be at nightfall and if you’re late, wolves will be the least of your worries.”

Moire kissed her wife and donned her boots and set out into the woods.

She went to the cabin first; she doubted it would be there after the search party’s intrusion but it was the best place to pick up the trail. Inside was as they had described it to her, tidier than she had expected despite the memory of blood that lingered in the floorboards. The beds had never been so neatly made nor the pots so well-scrubbed when Jeff and Beryl had lived there. 

The prints were in the mud outside, somewhat muddled by those of the villagers but still the marks of paw and boot and small, bare feet could be plainly seen. The pawprints were a young wolf’s and the footprints were a child’s. Or, she amended, something child-sized. They were not, it was clear from how they muddled and overlapped, made by a single shape-shifting creature. Two wolves and something that walked like a man. 

Standing in the middle of the clearing, Moire turned her face up to the sun and smiled. The late autumn mud held the spoor well and she had five hours of daylight left to find a creature that seemed to favour dusk. Whatever she told her wife, she had missed this.

She paced the circumference of the clearing, looking for breaks in the undergrowth, crushed grass, caught hair. A splintered birch twig, the wound still slowly oozing sap, pointed the way like an accusing finger. She followed, keeping the sun before her, and it wasn’t long before she came upon a game trail. Her quarry had followed it, trying to skirt the worst of the mud but every now and then she saw a paw print or a tuft of fur caught in some twist of branches to keep her on the trail.

In her younger days, she’d tracked harpies to their nests in the slick cliffs of Ayrad, and crocotta whose split hooves left no trace of their passage on the veldt. Her senses weren’t as keen as they had once been but they were keen enough for this. 

The game trail met a stream and the tracks did not continue onto the opposite bank. She paused upon the shore, considering. It would be easier to walk with the current but the brook broadened and deepened and the banks grew higher until it joined the river Lee. Safer to head upstream to where the country was wilder, the ground drier and rockier, harder to track across. It was the direction she would head were she her quarry and, while she didn’t like to make assumptions, she had time enough to double back if she guessed wrong. 

She guessed right and it was only half a mile or so before she found a section of crumbling bank with a climb written as plainly upon it as ink on parchment. The trail grew easier to follow over time, divots of mud kicked up as the walker stumbled, handprints pressed into the moss on the sides of trees, the appearance of a smudgy drag mark beside the footprints. It would not, she thought, go much further but then she hadn’t lived as long as she had by underestimating her quarry. She’d hunted sly kumiho in their fox forms and leshy who could only be found by those already lost and at their mercy. Safest to assume that whatever she followed had the advantage. She slowed, measuring out her footsteps, keeping every movement slow and even. Her senses strained, searching the environment for the snap of a twig, the sudden flash of bright-dyed cloth and searching herself for disorientation, confusion, the shifting of priorities brought on by enchantment.

Age had dimmed her other senses, but her nose was better than ever and she smelt them long before she saw them; rank animal, old sweat, dried blood. It was a grey blur of cloak on the trail ahead - Oma’s she recognized, stolen from the line the week before. The figure beneath it was small, small enough that the edges swept the ground, smaller than Moire, who was not a large woman. The two wolves walked at its side, thin beneath their fur. Thin with long hunger, and thin with the lankiness of youth; they were little more than pups. 

Moire shadowed them for a few hundred yards, satisfying herself that the creature had no weapons, no armour, no hidden allies, that it was walking slowly, dragging its feet and dragging a sack behind it. 

“That cloak isn’t yours,” she said, stepping out onto the trail, arrow nocked. It spun to face her, the cloak swirling. The hood was overlarge and she could see nothing beneath it, only the barest impression of features to prove it had a face at all.

There was a long, long pause, and she thought it wouldn’t answer, that she might have to kill it without ever understanding. But then it inclined its head, ever so slightly. 

“You know it’s wrong to steal?”

It considered and then bobbed its head again. 

“And you’re doing it anyway?”

A long, long pause and then it lifted the sack it had been dragging and hefted it towards her, underarm. It landed at her feet with a dull thud. She nudged it with her foot and a turnip rolled free. 

She inched closer, slowly, so slowly, to get a better look beneath the hood. Its eyes were too big and its face was sharp and pinched but even her old eyes could see that it wasn’t just small but young. She cursed under her breath. Monsters she knew what to do with. Children were another matter. “You’ve stolen more than that, little Púca,” she told it. “Two people are dead.” 

Still it didn’t speak. The wolf on its left shifted, a slow movement towards the cover of the brush at the edge of the trail. The one to its right began to growl.

Young or not, it was still dangerous. “Call them off,” she said. “Or die.” 

The púca spread the fingers of one hand, and the snarling wolf took one pace back and then one forwards. The púca glanced at it, quickly, but the snarling didn’t stop. 

“Walk towards me,” Moire said. “Arms above your head.”

It stared at her, its hands hovering at chest level and she saw the decision in its eyes before it made it. 

It bolted, throwing itself towards the shelter of the nearest tree. It was fast, uncannily so, but not faster than an arrow. Still, she was become a sentimental old woman and her shot only grazed its side. It staggered but did not slow its flight, ducking and weaving between the trees. She notched another arrow, drew back, and put an arrow in the rump of the slowest wolf. There was a yelp and its back paws skittered in the dirt, almost taking the other one down with it, but then it rallied and ran on. There was no time for a third shot; the undergrowth had already swallowed them and she wouldn’t waste the arrow. 

She allowed them half an hour’s lead. Tearing through the forest wouldn’t do her hip any good and would only panic the creature and prolong the chase. Better to let it go to ground and catch up with it at her leisure. She took out her pipe, filled it and lit it with a spark cut from a piece of flint on the forest floor. 

She took a puff leaning back against a rotten oak, enjoying the quiet, the smell of the forest and the curl of the smoke inside her chest. All she remembered of her first hunt - her first _real_ hunt - was a jumbled mosaic of impressions; oiled wood beneath her fingers, red hair curling in black water, the taste of moss on her tongue and the press of the rusalka’s cold lips against her own. In the time since she’d learnt how not to let the strangeness and the fear overwhelm her. It was when the killing became routine that she had stopped. 

When she set off again, the trail was even easier to follow. Blood speckled the ground at regular intervals and the injured wolf’s prints were pressed deep and dragging into the mud. She’d assumed they’d leave it behind but it was the healthy wolf’s tracks that split off. She followed them a little way, enough to confirm that they looped back around, heading in the same direction as the other two. An attempt to mislead her or set up an ambush? How intelligent was the creature and how much control did it have over the animals? 

It was late afternoon when she found it again, crouched in the hollow beneath a fallen tree. Time and, perhaps, badgers had carved out a muddy chamber, walled and roofed with tough, dry roots. Not the place she would have chosen, dark and claustrophobic as it was, but wolves did not climb trees. 

She approached slowly, bow held loosely in her hand. All she could make out in the darkness of the hole was the eyes. Two pairs gleaming in the darkness, so similar that she couldn’t tell which was wolf and which was faerie. 

Aiming between the roots, she raised her bow, targeting somewhere between the two sets of eyes. 

The hairs on the back of her neck pricked. She’d been expecting it but it made it no less unsettling to hear the rustle of undergrowth as something large stalked towards her. Wolves weren’t ambush predators and she could hear the pant of hot breath as it made its way towards her, the sudden silent stillness as it tensed to leap. She stared down at the creature in its hole and smiled and then the charge came and she spun to meet it. 

She sacrificed her bow, bringing it up to wedge between its jaws and then slammed the heel of her hand into its nose. It recoiled and she kicked it in the ribs, once, twice, the hollow impact like the beating of a drum. No fear, no pain, though its teeth had grazed her wrist. Only the sharp rush of exhilaration she felt on any hunt as she measured herself against a monster. If she was honest, it wasn’t the routineness of the kills that had made her stop. 

The wolf went down, rolling and whining in the dirt and she turned back to the tree. The faerie was already free of the hollow, sprinting at her with a blade held in its hand. 

Moire didn’t draw her own knife - that would end with both of them bleeding and it was faster than her - instead she tore her cloak from about her neck and held it before her, the folds of heavy wool hiding her body and hiding the movement of her free hand. 

The faerie darted at her, its hood falling back enough that she could see its mouth was set in a silent snarl. It bridled at the cloak and then came on, slashing high, low, high again. She retreated, boots sure on the loam, letting it cut cloth and empty air. It tired quickly, injured as it was, its attacks growing slower and wilder as it became more frustrated. 

It lunged for her, committed itself too much and she sidestepped the blow and saw the opportunity she’d been cultivating. She snared it, getting its hand too caught up in the cloak to strike her, trying not to think on how Ilya would nag when she saw the rents in the wool. It tried to struggle free and she dropped her full weight down onto its chest and punched it in its injured side for good measure. It gasped in pain with a voice too much like a child’s for comfort but Jeff and Beryl were dead and she didn’t care to join them. She used its shock to twist the knife from its grip and pressed the blade to its throat. 

She looked up, teeth bared, ready for the wolves to lunge, but the one she’d kicked had only just regained its feet and the one with the arrow still in it lurked further back, ready to bolt. Their teeth were bared, their tails held stiff and threatening but they didn’t approach. The flat angle of their ears spoke more of fear than threat. 

“Smart beasties,” she told them. “Stay where I can see you and he doesn’t need to die.”

The threat of the knife kept the creature still until she went to bind it. Then it fought, desperately, with teeth and clawing fingernails until she’d managed to get it properly wrapped up in her cloak, limbs pinned like a spider-snared fly, whereupon it went completely limp. She thought she’d hurt it, badly from the way its strange eyes rolled and its breath came in short, rasping pants, but she didn’t see how. The arrow wound wasn’t that deep and whatever else was wrong with it, there was nothing she could do where they were and so she wrapped it up tight in case it decided to struggle again and slung it over her shoulder. It wasn’t heavy but she wasn’t a young woman as her back was quick to remind her. 

On the walk back a thin, relentless drizzle started up, freezing blades of water that stabbed cold down into her bones. Years ago she scarcely would have noticed but now her right hip twinged with every step where another wolf, long years ago, had buried its teeth. She grunted and shifted her soggy burden to her other shoulder. The creature hadn’t moved or made a sound since she’d caught it but she didn’t care to stop now, not with the wolves following her on either side, ghost-grey blurs against the dusk. Injured or not, she’d prefer not to face them again. 

It might be smarter to kill the thing and then its pets. But there had been cages in the back of the cabin where the dead trappers kept wolf pups, bear cubs, lynx kittens, anything that they could sell on to the pit fights in the cities. They had all been empty but for one which held a bucket and a ragged blanket. A padlock with the key still in it hung from the open door. Beryl had always been sly and Jeff greedy, and they’d been caught up in that bad business with the Carrow boy. If they’d caught something they shouldn’t have and been killed for it, killed _by_ it, then that was justice or as close to it as the forest ever gave. But she had to be sure.

Home had rarely been a more welcome sight. The light in the windows shone against the rain like eyes looking out for her return and the chickens, already shut away for the night, heard her approach and clucked a greeting from within their coop. The few flowers that had lasted out the chill nodded at her from the tiny bed beside the door; the damp suppressed their fragrance but she could still smell woodsmoke and the welcome scent of potato soup cooking. 

The wolves watched her from the treeline as she shut the gate behind her and let herself in. 

It was a small cottage but they didn’t need much space for the two of them and Ilya had brightened it with those of her throws and tapestries that she considered too poorly made to sell. Moire thought her wife had unreasonably high standards but Ilya would tut and blush whenever Moire told her they were beautiful, dropped threads or no. 

She was at her loom again when Moire entered and dropped her bundle before the hearth, nodded towards the axe they kept beside the door, and sat down upon the stoop to tip the water from her boots. Ilya ignored the axe, set aside her shuttle, and brought her a dry blanket instead. 

“Your face!” Ilya cried. 

The creature’s nails had raked her in its struggles but all were shallow and the rain had already washed away the worst of the blood. “Only scratches. You needn’t fuss.”

“Then you’ve no excuse for being late,” she said, scrubbing at Moire’s hair. 

“The rain.” Ilya’s hands were one Moire’s favourite thing about her, still soft and supple as they had been when they first met, and she leaned into their touch.

“I’ve kept your soup warm for you. Bread’s on the table.”

“You’ve already eaten?”

“You’re _very_ late. I can’t spend my whole life waiting on you, darling,” Ilya said, dropping the blanket over her head.

“I’m sorry.” More sighed and picked her way over to the fire, where the remaining soup steamed in its pot above the embers. The bowl she ladled out was hot enough to scald her tongue, and hot enough to scald her hand when she turned and spilt it at the sight Ilya bending over the bundle, fingers already working the knots out of the wet cloth. 

“Will it bite?” she asked. 

“It might,” Moire said, exchanging her bowl for the bread knife. She wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, until the cloak was unwrapped and the creature continued to lay still, and then she realised her grip on the knife was white-knuckled. She turned and cut a slice off the loaf to hide her relief. 

“Other wives bring flowers,” Ilya said, looking up from the body, her eyebrows raised. “You bring me...a dead goblin?”

“Half dead,” Moire said, her mouth stuffed full. 

Ilya knelt at the faerie’s side, brushing lank grey hair away from pointed ears. He shivered and she drew her hand back. “Poor little mite,” she crooned, shooting Moire a filthy look when she failed to conceal a snort. Ilya liked children no better than Moire but she, unlike Moire, saw it as a personal failing. “I really was expecting a wolf.” 

“They’re outside.”

Ilya smiled and then something scrabbled at the door and her face froze. “You’re not joking.”

“They can’t get in,” Moire said. “And even if they could, they won’t attack while we hold him.”

“How can you be so blase about this?” Frustration mingled in her voice with fear and Moire, now the thrill of the hunt had faded, began to feel ashamed. 

“You’re right. I’m sorry.” She stood and came to crouch beside her wife, taking her hand. “We don’t have to keep it here. I can drag it into town right now, or we can lock it in one of the outbuildings. I can kill the wolves.”

“No, don’t. Don’t kill anything. You don’t have to do that. Just- What are we supposed to do with him?” She hesitated. “Can he understand us?”

He was conscious, Moire thought, for all that his eyes still had that glassy, unfocused look. “Seems to. And I don’t know. It- _he_ killed those two trappers. Or had the wolves do it for him.”

“And you brought him here?”

“He might’ve had cause.” 

“Well, if you were planning to kill him you would have done it already. I’ll get another bowl, shall I?” she said, practical and decisive. It was another thing Moire loved her for. She’d helped Moire raise orphaned hippogriff foals and chase kappa out of the well with the same cheery unflappability.

Moire lit her pipe again as Ilya bustled with the soup, keeping her eyes on the creature. The goblin? Elf? She would have to ask Hobb in the morning but whatever it was, it wasn’t all that impressive to look at. Ragged, ill-fitting clothes and grey hair hacked short and lumpy. Greyish skin but she wasn’t sure how much of that was dirt. It had the expected pointy ears but really its eyes were the only interesting thing about it; they were the reddish amber of hot coals. 

Outside one of the wolves howled, shrill and pained, and the creature’s head jerked up, eyes snapping into focus. Its gaze flicked about the room from Moire to Ilya, the fire, the door. They settled on the axe in the corner. 

“Try it,” Moire said. “See how that ends up.” She shifted in her seat, ready to rise if necessary. 

He shuffled backwards, into the corner, drawing in on himself. Away from the forest, without wolves or weapons, he looked less strange and fey than young and thin and frightened. But there were wolf-gnawed bones in a shallow grave, even if she’d never cared for their owners. 

“Are you hungry?” Ilya asked him. She held the second bowl of soup to her chest, reluctant to withhold it, reluctant to reach out. 

“Leave it on the floor,” Moire said. “You’re right; I didn’t bring him back to kill him. But the town will want to know the monster’s gone.”

“They’ll want one death more,” said Ilya mildly, setting the bowl down and giving it a gentle nudge in the boy’s direction. “This is your business, not mine, but you make sure he eats that soup all the same. And see that we aren’t murdered in our sleep, love.” She stooped to kiss Moire, one fine hand cupping her chin, and then was gone. 

“What do you say, boy? _Are_ you a monster?” Moire asked. Outside, one of the wolves howled again. The boy refused to meet her eyes.

There came the click of claws on the frozen ground and then something scratched at the door.

“Don’t,” she said. “Do you think I won’t kill them?”

The sound of padded paws retreating and then a low, unhappy whine. 

“Better. You heard my wife. Eat your soup.”

He reached out and picked up the bowl, balancing it carefully on his fingertips, whether because it was hot or because he was preparing to throw it she wasn’t sure. She raised the breadknife in something like a salute, something like a threat, and cut another slice off the loaf. She held it out. 

“So. You have some talking to do.”

No talk was forthcoming but, slow and nervous as a wild bird offered crumbs, he reached out for the bread. Snatched it and pressed back against the wall. 

“You can plead your case to me, or I’ll drag you into town come morning and you can plead to the magistrate,” Moire told him as he tore at it. “She’s a fair sight kinder than I, and didn’t shoot you besides, but she likes things to be neat. Doesn’t always understand that sometimes, in the woods, you do what you have to do.”

Moire was, by nature and careful nurture, very good at waiting and took the lack of response in her stride. “Is that what happened? Did you have to kill them?” she prodded gently. It was bait but if he leapt upon the offering it would give her the measure of him. 

There was no leap. The boy choked down the last of the bread and reached picked up the soup again. 

“You heard what I said to Ilya? There needs to be proof that this is done with. I could kill the wolves and say this was all their doing-”

He tensed, flat ears going flatter against his head, and now the bowl was definitely gripped like he meant to throw.

“-But I like wolves. Always have. An old pelt from my stores might satisfy her. If your story satisfies me.”

“Let me go.” It was a child’s voice, thin and breathy under the strange accent. A child’s plea. The fae could lace enchantment in their words, Moire knew, but she felt no different. Perhaps the strength of her will, or the dried rowan berries strung about her neck, or perhaps he hadn’t tried at all. 

“You killed Jeff and Beryl. You’re wearing her shirt now.” Moire had no idea if that was true, only that it was sized for a woman and she didn’t remember anyone complaining of its theft. “Tell me why and maybe I will.”

“They wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Let me _go_ ,” he said and threw. 

She’d been expecting it and ducked in time, which saved her a wooden bowl to the temple but not a dousing in potato soup. As fast now as he had been in the forest, he darted for the door, clawed fingers fumbling at the lock.

Bread knives were not made for throwing, but the shock of it thumping handle-first into the wood was enough to startle him, keep him from getting the latch open and letting in the night until she’d crossed the distance, got close enough to kick him in the back of the knee. He went down, went for the knife and she kicked him in the head as well and snatched it up. 

Something heavy thudded against the door, rattling it on its hinges.

“That was stupid,” said Moire as the boy groaned, twitched, tried and failed to rise. “Stubborn little thing, aren’t you?” 

She contemplated stuffing him in the linen chest for the night. He was small enough for it, but she wasn’t cruel enough. Instead, she bound his hands, took back the knife, and made him a nest of spare blankets there in the corner. “D’you need to piss?” 

If he did, he didn’t answer. He lay where she’d left him, watching her with all the wariness of a wolf at bay. Too easily she could picture Jeff and Beryl, alone in their cabin with the night pressing in and something that looked like a boy but wasn’t, watching them with baleful eyes. 

But for all he wasn’t a boy, the goblin was young and small, hurt and filthy, and there was more fear than hate in those ember eyes. 

“Try that again and I’ll hurt you again,” she told him. “And it won’t get either of us anywhere. Maybe you do kill me, and my wife in the bargain, but where does that leave you? Other hunters will come, who aren’t sentimental old women and won’t bother trying to talk sense into you. Or maybe you run away back into the woods and go back to starving and stealing scraps. Either of those sound good to you?” His eyes were on her, bright and wary, but he didn’t answer and she nudged his shoulder with the toe of her boot. “I’m not talking to myself here.”

“No,” he grunted, squirming away. 

“Good lad. So here’s my offer; you’ll stay here with me until I’m satisfied you’re no threat, and I’ll see you’re fed and clothed. I’ll even teach you a trade - something more useful to do with yourself than stealing turnips. But any more playing silly buggers - from you or your pets - and I’ll slit your throat myself. Sound fair?”

It wasn’t really an offer, and at his age, angry and cornered, faced with someone willing to condescend but not to kill, she’d have spat insults at the very least. But the boy’s eyes dipped to stare at the bare plank floor, the tension sliding out of him to make way for exhausted resignation. 

“Yes.”

‘I won’t hurt you again,’ was a lie and so she didn’t tell it. “Get some sleep,” she said instead. “And in the morning I’ll take a look at your side.”


	2. Chapter 2

As your days ran down, the need for sleep went with them. The need for soft bedding and a warm wife over hard wooden chairs increased, but Moire could survive one night. As far as she could tell, their guest didn’t sleep either, but when she rose to light the fire and start the porridge he blinked and started, so perhaps he’d dozed.

“I hope you appreciate the sacrifice I’m making, giving you the benefit of the doubt,” she told him, as her knees clicked and popped. “How d’you like your porridge? Salt? There’s honey - you folk are supposed to like sweets, are you not?”

The silence was less unsettling, now that she knew he could talk and chose not to. 

“What did you find out?” Moire knew Ilya’s soft footsteps like she knew her own, but the boy started again as Ilya padded into the room. 

“We’ve got an understanding now. Feeling chattier this morning, lad?”

“No.” The goblin’s face was perfectly blank.

“Was that a sense of humour?”

“No.”

For that, Ilya put a blob of honey on his porridge before sliding the bowl to him, though they left his hands bound and watched him close. This time he didn’t throw it, which was a relief - they didn’t have crockery to spare. 

“I’m Moire”, she told him as wariness gave way to the gorging of a well-mannered wolf. “And this is my wife Ilya.”

The goblin licked the spoon and set it down in the scraped-clean bowl. He was still looking at them sidelong, ears pinned flat, and the effect was uncomfortable. 

“Tell us your name and you can have seconds.”

A long, considering pause. “Gil.” 

“I’m Moire, and this is my wife Ilya. A happy family, hey?”

“He killed Jeff and Beryl,” Ilya reminded her mildly, as Moire slopped another ladleful into the bowl. 

“I’m hoping he has more sense than to try it again. You’ll at least wait until I’ve seen to that wound.”

But it was Ilya that did the seeing; her stitching was neater, her gentleness came easier, and Moire wanted her hand free for the knife if it came to it. 

It didn’t. He wouldn’t drink the raw spirits they brewed from windfall apples that served as anaesthetic and antiseptic both, but he let Ilya sit beside him on the bench and draw up the grimy shirt to show the raw, red gash Moire’s arrow had opened. Because he knew now that fighting her was pointless, or because the animal panic from the night before had faded enough for him to see the good of what they offered. 

“It’s not so bad. Just a graze,” Ilya said, though Moire could see how the wound gaped open, how the blood had clotted and stiffened the fabric of his shirt. “This will only pinch a little,” was another lie; Gil went pale as milk, bound hands clenched upon the table as Ilya cleaned the wound with spirits and boiled water, and then sewed it shut with small, neat stitches and her finest thread. When Ilya was done, there were fresh scratches in the worn wood of the tabletop, and Gil jerked away, sliding as far along the bench as he could without falling to the floor. All that, Moire had expected. 

“Thank you,” he said quietly, which she hadn’t.

Ilya beamed. “You’re very welcome. Now, why don’t we see about a bath and some clean clothes?” The old ones were rank with fresh blood, old sweat, and the wet-dog stink of wolf. 

Distrust warred on his face with a yearning Moire understood as only someone who’s spent months in the woods covered by mud and dried gore could. If fear could not be overcome by grand gestures, it could by small ones. “You’ll be helping fill the tub.”

Even with Moire keeping a close eye, with her strung bow across her lap, fetching water from the well behind the cottage was the best opportunity to make a run for it that he’d had since she caught him in the forest, ducking low and darting for the cover of the trees, where the wolves were surely waiting. But he didn’t take it. He filled the tub and fetched wood for the fire, and when the water was steaming, Moire made her own concession, looking away while he undressed and stepped into the water with a hiss that was half the pain of scorched toes and half relief. 

She had reason enough to watch him close, but Moire was still careful of where she looked as she handed him a block of the hard soap they made from goat tallow, ash, and rosemary to make it smell less like goat tallow. 

“Where are your wolves?” she asked, as water splashed and slopped against the copper sides of the tub. 

“The wood,” said that dry, soft voice. 

“Would they come, if you called them?”

“Maybe.” There was a pause and another splash. “Would you kill them?”

“Maybe.” Moire looked and saw pale, thin shoulders, hunched so that the blades jutted like wings. Hollow ribs still painted with the bruises she’d put there the day before, the neat line of the cut Ilya had stitched. There was an older scar - a few months healed, Moire judged - carved into the slope of one shoulder. Two puncture wounds, badly closed. 

She nodded to them. “Did Jeff do that? Or Beryl?”

The boy hunched over further and said nothing.

“Make sure to scrub behind your ears,” said Ilya, who was warming to her role. She held up a blotched and age-yellowed tunic, and said, half to herself, “This one ought to fit, if we belt it.” It was Moire’s, put away until Ilya had time to dye it so the stain of ancient blood would not show quite so stark. 

Dressed in clean clothes, with the blood and grime soaped from his face and hair, the boy looked much the same if Moire was honest; young and thin and wary. He smelt better though, and the wariness was less than it had been, caution more than terror.

“What now?” said Ilya, and the look on Gil’s face said the same. Keeping a prisoner was rather harder than Moire had anticipated, especially when Moire was no longer sure that’s what he was. 

“Do your weaving,” Moire decided. There was an old length of chain in the storeroom, from which she fashioned a makeshift shackle. Mutiny flickered across Gil’s face when she held it up, but he let her fix it about his ankle. More and more, he put her in mind of a feral dog; vicious with hunger and the memory of pain, but obedience went deeper, down to the bones and it took very little to wake it again. “Only while I sleep,” she told him. “And only until I trust you.”

Moire had the hunter’s trick to catching sleep when she needed it, and so sleep she did, despite the prickle at the back of her neck whenever she looked at Gil’s red eyes. Her dreams were red as well, and she woke from them with aching gums and the taste of metal on her tongue, the covers tangled about her legs. 

But all was quiet, save the soft sparrow-twitter of Ilya’s voice and the thrum of the loom. She watched the pass of the shuttle through slitted eyes, peering around the curtain that separated their bed from the main room of the cottage. Gil was crouched beside her, still but attentive, following, too, the deft, birdlike flutter of Ilya’s hands over the thread. When she handed him the shuttle, after long hesitation, he took it. It sat as easily in his hand as the knife had. 

* * *

“He’s not a child,” Moire reminded Ilya that night. Ilya and herself. “He’s fae. Dangerous. Remember the wolves, if you forget. Remember Jeff and Beryl.”

“He can be dangerous and a child as well.” Ilya snuggled closer under the covers, pressing her warm hands to Moire’s belly. “How old do you think he is?”

“They don’t age as we do.”

Ilya prodded her with one bony finger and then smoothed away the jab with her palm. “But if you had to guess.”

“Thirteen, maybe.”

“And do you think he’ll kill us in our sleep?”

“Not tonight.” When Ilya had begun to snore, she slipped from her bed to watch the boy, still in the nest of blankets they had set before the hearth. Foolish and dangerous, she reminded herself again, as he twitched, caught in sleep like a rabbit in a snare. 

But you didn’t live long in Moire’s profession by second-guessing your instincts. Some caves you didn’t step into for the way the hairs rose on your neck, some arrows you notched and fired blind at the dark, and sometimes you stayed your blow. 

Sometimes you adopted a goblin. 

Moire nodded to the sleeping boy and went back to lie beside her wife. 

* * *

Hobb could always be relied upon to be up early. 

Hobb wasn’t really her name - if she had one she’d never given it - but it was what she was. She was small and stoop-shouldered with ears as long as Moire’s goblin’s and an even longer nose. It curved down and her pointed chin curved up to meet it like the horns of a crescent moon. Her thin lips were forever pursed around a mouthful of tacks for she was a cobbler and an industrious one. She fashioned delicate slippers with stitching even finer than Ilya could manage, and sturdy work boots tough enough to protect against a horse’s stamp and warm enough to keep out the chill of the coldest winter. “Faerie craft,” merchants would say, looking over her work. 

“Hard work and practice,” Hobb would insist. 

The little faerie had a fondness for embroidered waistcoats and bought them from Ilya, and if she and Moire weren’t friends, they were both too steeped in strangeness to have better options for companionship. Moire didn’t mention the thefts or the murders, when she told the tale to Hobb, though it would be easy enough for Hobb to put it together. She said only that she’d found him in the woods two days ago, and she and Ilya had taken him in for the winter, and with the boy waiting outside, quiet and meek with his hood pulled up against the sun, it was almost convincing. Hobb didn’t look up from her workbench but she frowned and tutted in all the right places. 

“He won’t say what he is or where he came from,” Moire said when she’d finished, shooting a glance to Gil in case he’d overheard. He seemed entirely occupied in stroking the nose of a mangy dog that had wandered over, and paid them no mind at all, though his ears were angled towards them. 

Hobb lowered her awl and squinted out into the sunlight, where the dog leaned heavily against the boy’s knees, its ragged tail thumping. A harmless enough scene, Moire thought, and there was no reason for Hobb to draw back from the sight with what had to be a curse in her own language, a rattling hiss of words like water over rocks.

“From Zalach’ann,” she told Moir, wrinkling up her long nose as though she’d smelled something filthy. “Beneath the Ishlingwalls. Over two hundred miles away, praise the Lady.” 

That had Moire hissing between her teeth. To the north, the courts of the faerie lords stretched above and below the ground, opulent and terrible. In towers of starlight and obsidian they danced and loved and killed as it pleased them. They took tribute from their vassals; silver, songs and slaves who lived lives of enchanted bliss as they worked their fingers to the bone. Or so the stories went, and Moire thought more than a few had been penned by bards led more by their imaginations than common sense. When she’d passed through as a young woman, she’d seen plenty of farms and hardly any beautiful faerie women with their tits hanging out, and she’d looked very carefully. Gil himself had more in common with a drowned rabbit than the dread knights from  _ The Queen of Spiders’ Kiss _ .

“Are you sure he came alone?” said Hobb.

“But for a pair of mangy wolves.” Mangy wolves that’d kept out of sight on their walk down to the village; Moire had watched the woods for grey fur and amber eyes. 

“I’d say to kill him and be quick about it,” Hobb said, fast and fierce. “But it may just be too late. If the Gentry do come calling, you’re better off having him to hand.”

Moire hadn’t thought the little cobbler had anything but joviality in her and the vehemence drew her up short. Still, her mind was made up already. “Don’t go spreading this round,” she told Hobb, who spat out a tack onto the hearth. 

“You think I want his folk hunting here? You can bet I’ll keep quiet.”

When Moire stepped out into the muddy slush of Ashbrooke’s main street, Gil followed obediently at her heels, pausing only to wave goodbye to the dog. “Were you listening?” she asked him; she’d seen his ears flick when Hobb said ‘kill him’, like a horse bitten by a fly. 

Gil said nothing, but it was a wary sort of nothing. The street wasn’t bustling, because there weren’t enough people in Ashbrooke to bustle, but there were folk coming and going about their morning business, carrying loaves to be baked and milk to be churned, driving geese and sheep to their grazing. An ugly place for a fight, but she could see his borrowed boots poised in the muck to leap for her or, more likely, to run. Across the fields and back into the woods, if he could make it. “Hobb says you’re from over the Ishlingwalls.”

“Under. She said ‘under’,” he mumbled, eyes on the muddy, dung-cobbled street.

“What do  _ you  _ say?” Moire held up a finger as his ears flicked again and his mouth opened to give another deflection. “How’d you get from the mountains to here? That’s over two hundred miles.”

Gil shrugged and made a vague gesture with his hands. “Tunnels.”

“Two hundred miles of tunnels is still two hundred miles.”

“It’s not. It’s folded.” He pinched the hem of his tunic, twisting the cloth between his fingers into folds, and at last she saw what he was getting at.

“Magic?” she said dismissively. “Well, we’re well shot of that. I don’t care where you’re from. Or why you ran. I only care that you don’t have an army at your heels.”

“No army.” 

He didn’t claim not to be running, she noticed. “I suppose,” she said, “That if they’d been looking, they’d have found you.” Half-mute or not, now that he wasn’t trying to kill her or frozen in fear that she’d kill him, Gil was very easy to read. One only had to watch the way his ears twitched and set back against his head. “Fair enough. Come on, this cloth won’t sell itself.”

People turned their heads to stare as Moire shouldered past them, with the boy trotting in her wake. Strangers were a rare enough sight that they’d have done the same whether he’d been a troll or a travelling tinker. If Moire had been able to choose a place to keep a half-mute goblin child then Ashbrooke, with its three streets and one tavern, its rickety mill that ground as much gossip as flour, wouldn’t have been it. But it was where they were, and better to get things out in the open now than let the rumours build. Make it mundane and they’d be bored of it by the new moon. 

And the cry of “Moire! Moire!” was just the opening she needed. Panting, muddy to his knees, Olau squelched down the street and skidded to a stop before them. “Did you catch it yet?” he asked her. And then his eyes flicked from her to her silent shadow. 

Moire hid her wince. She had little patience for the man at the best of times. Not because he was a blowhard, although he was, and not because he was a drunk, though he was that as well; Olau started fights he couldn’t win at the tavern, and then went home to start fights that he could. 

“Not yet,” Moire said, trying to catch the boy’s eye again. “Reckon it’s laying low for the winter, the clever beastie. This is Ilya’s sister’s son. Staying with us for a while, to learn a little woodcraft.”

Olau frowned down at the boy’s pale face and cobweb hair, the lambent red eyes and ears that pricked like a hound’s. “Ilya’s sister’s son?”

“I say sister - they were that close as girls - but in truth it’s a cousin,” she said, and when Olau still frowned, added, “He’s from over Shriventree way.” Shriventree was almost twenty miles down the road and more than far enough to explain any type of strangeness. 

Olau nodded, and with that nugget of information safely tucked away, returned to the more important topic; “What about my other goats?”

“I don’t like you making me a liar,” Moire said when Olau had been placated and gone on his way, straight to the Piper to trade the latest gossip for a round if Moire guessed right. “So we’d better put some truth into what I told Olau. We’d better teach you some woodcraft.”

* * *

Moire had taken students before, but being an excellent archer did not make one an excellent teacher. Every apprenticeship had ended in bitterness and Moire remembering why, upon the hunt, she preferred her own company. But none of her previous apprentices had known how to be silent - both the silent that came from a held tongue and the silent that came from care and stillness and letting yourself empty like a jug until your body was a trapline waiting to be sprung. 

Gil took to it with an ease that would have been disturbing in a human child. Coming from a half-wild faerie, it seemed only natural that he only needed her to point the way. To show him the correct knot for a snare and how to tell crowberry from nightshade.

No need for the chain, she decided after the first week. Watch closely, yes, not least because Moire was in the habit of watching close. It was how she knew the wolves were still out there, pacing them on every trip into the woods to gather mushrooms and stalk game. Out of sight but for a flick of a tail between the trees and a certain rankness on the air. 

She left the odd rabbit out for them, the guts of a butchered deer, and in turn they left well enough alone. 

The silence grew comfortable, like worn-in boots, so that when Gil finally broke it, in the middle of helping her field dress a deer, she almost sliced her thumb off. 

“Thank you.” It came out lower than the rustle of the brush. 

“For what?” she said, lowering the knife so she could look at him. 

A month of eating their food and sleeping beside their hearth had done a little for the wariness, but only a little. A curl of gore flecked one pale cheek and his eyes slid away from meeting hers like a dog’s, but he wasn’t poised on the terrified brink of bolting as she’d have expected weeks ago. 

“It’s not so bad.” She wiped her hands on the hind’s flank and offered the blade to him. “Passing all this on. I thought it would die with me.”

He took it, held it easily, unbothered by the tacky blood on the handle, but didn’t put it to use. “Lots of people must want. To learn.” Getting words from the boy was like squeezing milk from stone, but the clench of his fingers around the knife, the way his ears angled back a little, weren’t so hard to read. 

“It’s been years and years since I hunted for more than filling our cooking pot. People don’t come looking anymore.” And then, because she did remember being young and desperate for a teacher’s approval, “Even if they did, I doubt I’d find a better student.” 

Gil blinked. Swallowed. Looked down at his bloody hands. “We didn’t kill the goat.”

As much as she’d learned to read him, the subject change had Moire baffled. “Goat?” 

“The man’s.”

“Olau’s?” He nodded. “Who’re you kidding? They tore it limb from limb.”

“We didn’t. Just chickens, sometimes.”

“I suppose it was some  _ other  _ wolf?” Moire said, but uneasily. A lie he might have told in the moment, but why brood on it until now, when all was more or less forgiven? Her supper churned uneasily in her gut. 

Gil shrugged at her, unhappily. Maybe on the verge of saying more, maybe on the verge of bolting. She waited, and the silence wrapped around them again. The deer’s innards they left lying out for Gil’s wolves, but Moire looked often over her shoulder as they took the trail for home. 


	3. Chapter 3

Winter sank its teeth into the land. The wells froze, and Moire went less into the woods. A warm fire, a warm bed and a warm wife held more appeal than hunting scarce game in a cold that would freeze fingers brittle as twigs. 

“I knew we took you in for a reason,” she said as Gil stuffed rabbit pelts into borrowed boots and set off to check the traplines. 

He shrugged and stepped outside in a rush of light and icy air, only to hesitate upon the stoop.

“Close the door!” Moire called, and he did, though the look in his eyes, above the scarf wrapped around his lower face, was strange. When he was gone, and she needed to fetch more wood besides, she went to the door herself.

There were prints upon the stoop. A wolf’s for a certainty - she could read spore better than her letters. One that was lame in its hind leg - not badly so, but enough that she took notice. 

Later, when Gil was back, dicing rabbits for Ilya to stew, Moire asked after his pets. He’d dressed the conies in the woods, and she would have scolded him for wasting good offal, but she thought she knew what he’d done with them. 

“Healed up well, did they?”

The room smelled of the onions frying in the pan over the hearth, warm and stuffy, dim for the shutters were closed against the cold. Ilya gave her a searching look and then turned back to the rabbits, rolling strips of pink meat in flour and setting them aside. 

Gil’s look was warier but finally he nodded. 

“Would they come, if you called?”

A shrug.

“Call them.”

He set aside the knife and rose from the table, stepping to the door like she’d asked he call his siblings in for dinner. 

Moire had spent long enough hunting faeries and wizards gone to the bad to know how magic worked, but some part of her still expected him to holler into the woods. Instead he slid the latch and stood in the doorway, looking out into the cold, the wind pressing Moire’s old tunic against his chest. He didn’t make a sound. There were men who saw through the eyes of ravens, and women with great jungle cats that hunted at their sides, and that first silent battle in the forest told her the boy’s wolves were more familiars than pets. 

Familiars, it seemed, that were able to disobey their master whenever it pleased them. There was no rush of fur and fang, no lithe, grey shapes materialising from the tree line. There was only the snow and the silence. 

“They won’t come,” he said, after long minutes shivering on the stoop. His voice was always inexpressive, but Moire thought she caught a waver in it. 

“Why not?” she said, though she was afraid she already knew. 

“They’re afraid.”

Or he hadn’t called them at all. Were they more dangerous under his control or free of it? Despite the stories, wild wolves kept to their woods, only straying into settlements if they were starved, or the half-broken things that sometimes the fighting pits let loose when they were too injured or too aged to be of use. _Those_ wolves wouldn’t hesitate to take a straying goat, any more than they’d hesitate to take a straying child. 

Ten years ago, Moire would have killed the wolves before she tried to untease the mystery of where they and the boy had come from. Now she could only hope her hesitation wouldn’t cost her too dearly.

“Never mind, lad. Let’s get supper finished,” she said, clapping Gil’s shoulder. 

* * *

“Where did you go last night?” Ilya asked her, taking down her hair. 

It rippled down her back in silver waves, and Moire breathed deep of its scent. “The privy,” she said and, when Ilya frowned she leaned in to kiss the furrow away. 

_I’m worried_ , Moire could have said. But she wasn’t sure what by. She’d dreamed of the hunt every night for the past month. Her lungs bursting and her limbs burning as she raced through the forest beneath a cloud-smeared moon. Blood in her mouth, pain throbbing through her with every pound of her feet upon the dirt, but something in her thrilled. _This_ was what she’d been made for, had tempered herself for like a blade. 

Years of quiet days she’d told herself that she was glad for, but while her heart was with Ilya, the greater part of her was for this. Chasing down the boy had woken something she’d long thought put to bed. 

The next morning, as Ilya set up her loom and Gil washed up her breakfast things, Moire heaved the pile of linens off the old chest where she kept the relics of another life. Dried rowan berries and yarrow, mirror shards and silver blades, and the tail of a manticore. The stinger still glistened with thick, oily venom despite the long years passed.

“You’re learning to hunt game well enough,” she told Gil, when he gave her a curious glance. “Learning to take care of yourself. But there’s hunting and there is hunting, and it’s time you learned the latter.” 

“That wolf’s been at my goats again,” said Olau, the moment she set foot within his yard. He squinted sharply at Gil, who shuffled behind Moire’s back. “My prize milch goat, all torn apart. I thought you said you’d killed it?”

“I said nothing of the kind,” Moire reminded him. “But I’ll take a look at what’s been done.” 

There were a wolf’s broad footprints in the muck of the yard, and the wreckage of what certainly wasn’t his prize milch goat - it wasn’t female for a start. Still, it was a loss, although she noted, crouching down, that though the goat had been torn apart, near disemboweled, little of it had been eaten. What wolf would enter a human settlement and kill for sport?

She remembered the worry in Gil’s flat voice as he told her he hadn’t killed the last one.

If that was a lie to cover _this_ , then it hadn’t been a good one. 

The corpse stank, the deep, thick reek of goat and gore and Moire stepped back from it. It was a long time since such a sight had moved her, but the crack of splayed ribs echoed in her head and her mouth filled suddenly with the hot taste of copper. “Butcher the remains,” she suggested. 

Olau huffed and rested his fists on his hips. “I don’t need _you_ to tell me what to do with a dead goat. I need you to stop them ending up like this. What if it’s not my goats next time? What if it’s my sons?”

Olau’s sons were tall, hard-faced and practical, for their father had left them little choice. “I’d say the wolves have more to fear. And that wolves are the least of theirs.” Olau was taller than his boys, broad through the chest, thick about the waist. Not the hard muscle it must’ve been in his youth though, and even if it had been, it would take little effort for Moire to kill him. She let that certainty show upon her face and Olau retreated into the farmhouse, trailed by muttering. 

As they followed the wolf’s spoor through the woods away from the farm, Moire kept half an ear on the trees around her, for the rustle of undergrowth and the soft tread of a predator. “There are things other than a wolf that can leave tracks like that. There have been barghest in these parts before, so listen out for chains. Werewolves too, but not for a long time. Like as not, it’s just a wolf that’s grown too bold and too hungry.”

The hook was baited but he didn’t take it. “How do you stop a werewolf? Or- or a barghest.”

“Iron and fire for a barghest, and for mortal beasts as well. Silver for werewolves.” She showed him the knife she’d taken from the chest, silver etched so that the edges of the blade glowed like the hook of a sickle moon. In places the steel showed through from long years of honing, but it was still enough to do the job. “Otherwise they’ll shake off any harm you do them. Last wolf I fought, I took the damn thing’s head off and it hardly slowed it.”

“But they’re people. What if you don’t want to?”

“Kill them? That depends on them. A werewolf might have the sense to lock themselves in the root cellar when the moon gets full. Most don’t. Once you have a taste for what the sickness gives you, it’s a hard thing to give it up.” 

They walked a moment in silence, the icy mud crunching beneath their boots. 

“Do you know why I started, boy?” Moire said, surprising herself for she hadn’t meant to say the words until they were already out in the air. “I was a little older than you, with nothing in the world but a grudge burning in my stomach like a hot coal. And someone saw that and taught me. She said blood wouldn’t quench a grudge like that, and she was wrong.” She still thought back, sometimes, to the tackiness under her nails, to the pain in her side and the rasping, whistling gasp of the monster’s last breath. The memory was ragged with replaying but still as warm and comforting as the blankets Ilya had woven for their marriage bed. “But she also said it was a good trade for a half-wild orphan with more cunning than sense, and that she was right about. It’d be useful to know how to put fae beasties down if something _did_ come following after you, hey?”

The boy nodded his head, his eyes upon the trail. It petered out quickly - the wolf, if it was a wolf, went into a narrow brook, and as far as they followed the course, they couldn’t find the place where it left it. 

Moire tried and failed to find nothing suspicious in that. “It’ll be back,” she declared. “They usually are. And when it is, we’ll be ready.”

Ilya was less than pleased to hear Moire would be spending the next week camping in Olau’s goat shed. “I’m happy enough for the boy to stay,” she said. “He’s no trouble and I like having the help with the loom. Some things need nimble fingers, not these worn old claws.” Moire took the opportunity to kiss those claws one after the other, but Ilya didn’t let that distract her. “I don’t like you hunting again, though. Not now.”

“Whatever it is, it’s likely less dangerous than him,” Moire said. 

“That’s not the point.” But with an unhappy twist to her mouth, Ilya let them go. 

The moon waned from fat to skeleton thin in the week they kept watch, Moire drowsing in the goats’ straw and flatulence, half watching the yard and half watching the boy. He watched the goats, dark eyes speckled with starlight, and Moire hoped and hoped that she’d been right to trust him. 

They did catch a tilberi thieving milk from the udder of a placid white nanny, a shrieking little poppet of grey wool and yellow bone. It bled stolen milk when Moire crushed it beneath her boot, and the next day she had a stern talk with Gianni about keeping her witchcraft to herself. 

If there was anything more dangerous, they did not see hide of hair. Olau scowled when Moire told him she had a warm bed and warm wife waiting for her and couldn’t spend the whole winter in his goat shed waiting for a monster that might never come.

Olau chewed it over. “Just leave your faerie boy then, eh?”

Gil didn’t speak, but in the jut of his chin Moire thought she saw the same bone-deep need that she’d once felt to prove herself worthy. The question was, did Moire trust him? 

“Mind yourself,” she told Gil. She slid the silver dagger from its sheath and pressed the hilt into his hand. “A goat’s not worth dying for, whatever this one says.”

* * *

“I dunno how you put up with him,” Olau told her when he stumbled into her table at the Piper the next evening. The taproom was packed wall to wall - there weren’t a lot of people in Ashbrooke, but it wasn’t a very big room, and the thick haze of smoke clinking to the ceiling beams made it seem smaller. Hobb and Gianni were so tightly pressed against her sides that Moire had trouble raising her tankard. “What’s wrong with him, eh? Staring at my goats - ”

“As you asked him to,” Moire said tartly, taking a swig of the Piper’s even sharper cider. 

Olau’s jaw jutted like one of his old billys preparing to charge a fencepost. “Staring at my wife, too.”

“Leave off,” said Gianni, across the table from Moire, ducking a passing tankard. “It’s only staring. The lad’s shy, or simple, and there’s no harm in that.”

“There’s harm in it,” Hobb muttered dark into her tankard. “Which is all the more reason to leave off.”

“Ayup, his mother will have the skin off your back if you give the boy any trouble,” Moire said, kicking Hobb’s shin under the table. “If you don’t want him around, just say the word and I’ll have him back. Ilya’s pining.”

“I want the beast dead,” said Olau. He downed his ale and wove away from them across the floor towards the door. 

“Something’s going to end up dead,” said Hobb. She sucked down the last of her pint and smacked her lips. “It’s a dangerous game you’re playing, Moire.”

Pointless to argue that that wasn’t what she’d been doing ever since she let the boy live, with Ilya’s life as the stake. Olau’s too, but she didn’t much care if that was lost. “Shall we play something safer?” she said, and leaned over to snag a set of dice from one of the other tables.

“There’s nothing more dangerous than dicing with Hobb,” said Gianni, counting coppers onto the table. 

Hobb frowned, but wouldn’t say more in front of Gianni, and Moire was more than happy to forget blades and fangs for the night, to focus on being robbed blind by a smirking goblin. 

Forgetfulness only lasted to the bottom of a tankard. When she returned to the cabin, the boy was waiting upon the stoop. There was an ugly bruise blooming stark red across the side of his face, purpling around the eye. The first, treacherous feeling was relief; there was something else out there, something that he’d fought, and she’d been right to trust him. And then came concern and she rushed forwards, catching his chin and tilting it up to the moonlight. “Are you hurt? What came? Did you finish it?”

“No. Nothing. No.” He shied away, eyes skipping from her face to the shadows of the trees and then up to where the moon hung fat and swollen in the sky. 

“Walk into a door, did you?” Moire said, and then realised what that sounded like, how often she’d heard similar before. “Olau?” she said, stiffening, hands clenching as they hadn’t at the thought of a monster. “Why’d you let him do that?” 

No reply. Well, she could guess, and the knowledge pooled cold in her gut, quenching any warmth the drink had left. _Any more playing silly buggers - from you or your pets - and I’ll slit your throat myself._ “You can’t think I’d’ve minded you standing up for yourself? With Olau of all people?” she said, not knowing if she was more sickened by Olau or by herself. If a drunken lout had tried to smack her around at his age- Well, there was a reason she’d not been back to Northwold in five decades. “I’ll gut the bastard myself for this.” Moire turned back towards the town, anger and alcohol blurring her vision at the corners. “How _dare_ he - ”

“No!” said Gil, catching her sleeve, as emphatic as she’d ever heard him. “Don’t be angry. Please. It’s nothing.”

“He’s been left festering long enough. Someone should’ve done something sooner, but the boys’ve always lied for him. I shouldn’t have left you there in the first place.”

“Not tonight.” He hadn’t looked afraid before, but now his eyes were as round and white as the moon in the sky above. “Please.”

Anger and guilt still warred and that battle overwhelmed suspicion before it could take hold. “Alright, lad.” When she dropped a hand onto his shoulder, this time he didn’t shy away. “Not tonight. Come on, let’s put something on that bruise.”

* * *

As the sun rose, when the dawn air was crisp enough to bite, Moire woke to a pounding at the door. Loud and urgent, and Moire stretched her stiff limbs and yawned so wide her jaw ached as she rose to answer it. 

Walking through the main room, she tripped and almost fell over the snarl of blankets left beside the hearth. No sign of the boy, and she cursed him and stepped over it to the door where the knocking grew no less insistent. 

One of Olau’s sons stood upon the stoop, one fist raised, his coat clutched tight around him. His face was pale, his eyes as round as marbles, pupils black as the fall to the bottom of a well. There were dark smudges on his coat, his face, and the smell of blood rose from him like heat off an iron fresh from the fire. Acting on some instinct she could not name, Moire stepped out and closed the door behind her. “What is it, lad?”

“The wolf came back,” he said, soft and hoarse. 

“Another goat?” Moire asked, already knowing it wasn’t. 

“Our father.” 

“Gods’ blood.” Moire must have pulled on her boots, for she was wearing them as she set out into the snow behind the boy, but she had no memory of pulling them on. The old wound in her hip throbbed with every step and her skin crawled like it was ready to peel itself right off her bones. 

They kept a pace, her and the boy, rushing through the moonlit woods. Moire was old, too old for this, but that furious energy drove her on and the boy was drugged with grief, half stumbling in her wake. 

The firefly flickering of torches was visible from half a mile away. The people had gathered in their nightclothes, faces pinched with horror, but they parted for her when she stomped through them in her unlaced boots. Hobb tried to catch her eye but Moire walked on. The yard was cratered with hoofprints, once full of ice and brackish water, now shining dully red in the torchlight. The sight of Olau was a horrible one, but Moire had seen corpses split and pulpy, oozing like overripe fruit. Bodies you could only tell were human by the skitter of a molar beneath your heel. Olau’s face had been spared, even as the beast had worried at his throat and torn his belly open. Stepping closer, crouching over the body, Moire’s eyes skimmed the exposed ribs - a man’s were not so different from a goat’s - and the notches teeth had left there. Sharp, carnivore teeth. 

But her eyes strayed from the gore to the muddle of footprints surrounding the corpse. They were a wolf’s, heavy and lamed, and another set, small and light and careful, in boots that had once been hers. 

She scarcely needed to follow them on the looping route that took her from Olau’s farm back to their cottage in the woods. Ilya was there, alone. The moon shadowed her as she ran, high in the sky, pale and bloated as a corpse. 

When she stepped back into the room, Gil was waiting and so were the wolves, three pairs of eyes gleaming red with the banked light of the hearth. 

There were dark, wet pawprints on the floor and pressed in the snow outside, the curled corpses of leaves chasing each other in the draft from the door, and an awful fear on the boy’s face. There was a knife in his hands, and she recognised the moon-silver shimmer of the blade. 

“Why?”

He didn’t speak. 

“ _Why_ , gods damn it? I thought - ” She’d thought that for once she could do the right thing without taking a life. She’d thought that monsters could be tamed. She’d thought he was like her. “I thought you had more sense than that,” she said, hand closing around the haft of the axe she kept beside the door. One wolf growled low in her throat, but the faerie clutched the bristling fur of her neck, holding it back. “So they _do_ come when you call.” 

“I didn’t need them before.” The boy’s eyes were huge in his milk-pale face, red with flame and dark with what looked like fear. “I followed you to the farm,” he said. “I- It was too fast. I‘m sorry.”

Ilya was there, standing behind the boy with her hair loose and her robe clutched about her shoulders. She looked frightened too. But not of the boy, Moire saw suddenly as Ilya’s hand came to rest on his shoulder. 

“Step away,” Moire told him, fear clawing up her throat, turning the words into a hiss. “Step _away_ from her.”

Mute, Gil shook his head and Moire felt fear and fury rise like hackles. Years of clutching tight the leash, of checking her temper and hiding her blades, and it had been for nothing. She’d built a life on rotten foundations and it was all going to come tumbling down. Because she’d held her shot and brought him home, and now there was a monster standing in her cottage. 

“Moire.” It was the first time she’d heard him say her name and his accent made the word sound foreign. Like something that didn’t belong to her. “Don’t you know?”

She did. She’d been trying not to, trying for months, and only cowardice had kept her from admitting it. 

She was Moire the hunter. Moire the slayer of demons and beasts. Moire who had killed her first werewolf before she kissed her first girl. 

The thing about killing was, it got inside you. Became a part of you. 

And the thing about werewolves was -

Pain flared through her, bristling like fur, starting from the point on her hip where the wolf’s teeth had marked her, long years ago. The ache was a good one though, like stretching the cramp from a limb held too long still. The axe dropped from her hands to clatter to the floor as her fingers became something else. She could smell fear filling up the room like smoke. Cloth tore and Moire let her jaw go slack as her teeth ached, loosened, grew. 

Ilya screamed. 

Gil crouched, the knife sharp in his grip.

Moire sprang. 


	4. Chapter 4

That first fight, Moire had beaten him with the weight of experience. Now she’d win because the wolf was stronger than he was, and faster by far. 

The knife skittered along her ribs as she bore him down. Silver was a new pain, a bright burning agony, but then he was pinned beneath her and her teeth were at his throat and what was pain to that? His cloak was in the way and she tore at it, furious. She wanted to feel flesh part, blood on her tongue, taste something sweeter than Olau and the goats. Cloth parted but something struck her hard in the side, knocking her off him. 

One of the pups. She was terrified, ears flat, tail flagging, even as she bristled and bared her teeth. Moire lowered her head and growled, feeling it vibrate through her chest, staring the young bitch down.

By her paws, the boy was scrabbling on the floor for the knife and the part of Moire that remembered more than the chase and the crack of bone beneath her jaws knew better than to let him have it. 

He made a small, panicked noise as her teeth closed on his calf, but before she could shred muscle, something sharp and heavy came down hard upon her back with the gristly snap of a butcher’s cleaver jointing a carcass. 

Moire snarled and turned to face Ilya, who cowered back, holding the hatchet in shaking hands. A glancing blow and an iron axe could not kill a thing like her, said a hunter’s wisdom and a beast’s raw instinct. The wound was already itching itself shut. Betrayal cut deeper though, lodged like a shard within her chest. Ilya was _hers_ , and now she cowered, smelling of sage and cedar and rank terror. Her mouth was moving, words buzzing around Moire’s head like so many flies. She shook herself to keep them from her ears. 

The boy, the boy, this had started with the boy, and Moire rounded on him again, only to recoil as his boot crunched into her face. 

There were too many of them - the other pup was on her now, jaws closing around her leg. Bone crunched and Moire snarled her pain, shouldering him over, staggering on a leg that would not bear her weight. His teeth found her throat even as hers dug deep into the soft flesh of his belly. The pup screamed. Blood filled her mouth, and for a moment Moire forgot Ilya’s fear and the axe in her hands, the boy, the blade, the biting anger. There was only the thrill of the hunt, the blood on her tongue, the blood singing in her ears. 

She opened her jaws to bite again and a blaze of pain, liquid and silver, ran up her leg. 

The knife was sunk deep into her hind leg, above the already-closing wound the pup had made. The boy’s hand was on it, bloody to the wrist, and as he drew it back, he bared his teeth in a snarl that was a shadow of her own. 

The knife was bright in his hands, but so very small. Moire smiled at him with bare, bloody teeth. Leaving the pup to his whimpering, heedless of the bright thorn of agony in her thigh, she paced back across the cabin. 

She could smell tears now, mingling with the fog of blood in the air, but his face was dry, unmarked but for the bruise Olau had left. Not for long. She leaned in, jaws itching, opening, drool sliding between her teeth. 

But before she could make an end of it, the axe came down again. Moire snarled, reared, and Ilya struck her again, the blade taking a deep notch out of her spine. For a moment the pain from the knife wound dulled, along with all sensation in her legs. Just a moment though; she looked back over her shoulder to see Ilya’s face was wet, her arms bloody to the elbows, as she drew back the axe to hit her again. 

And again. 

And again.

Iron was not fatal, but there was only so much damage a body could sustain and the silver blazed ever brighter until all her vision was sparkling white and seeping red. 

* * *

Moire woke - she had not expected to wake - stretched out before the fire, wrapped in Gil’s blankets with Gil’s chain looped around her ankle and Gil crouched beside her. There was blood in his hair, and fine freckles of it splattered across his cheeks. She could only hope that it was hers. “Moire?” he said carefully. 

Her wounds were healed - the ruin the axe had made of her all knitted back together. But there was a burning along her ribs, a horrible bone-deep itching where the silver knife had cut her, and the pain in her head blazed hotter than the fire she lay beside. The shame burned hotter still. 

“The knife,” she croaked. 

He shook his head. 

“Didn’t I tell you not to hesitate?” she snapped, and he flinched back so badly that he stumbled. “I don’t expect you to do it, lad,” she said, more gently. “Just give me the blade.”

He shook his head more emphatically and then winced. 

“Are you hurt?” A stupid question. She remembered the panicked thumping of his heart, the heady stink of terror as she bore him down.

The gesture seemed unconscious as he brushed fingers to his throat, where a mottling of pink and violet bruises bloomed like flowers after rain. The skin was scraped raw but unbroken and Moire sighed with relief. 

“Where’s Ilya? Is she-” She wasn’t sure what question she wanted to ask. 

“Fine. She’s fine. Worried.”

“But not hurt?”

He shook his head. 

The room around them was in shambles, blood splattered across the floor and the walls up to the rafters. Someone had set the furniture to rights but the floor was still a jigsaw of broken crockery and snarled, loose thread. In the corner lay one of the wolf pups - the one Moire had mauled - curled up on itself. Bad enough she’d blamed it for her own crimes, never mind half disembowelling the poor thing. The weight of her gaze disturbed it; it looked up at her, its ears dipping back in aggression or fear. Without looking at it, without seeming aware of what he was doing, Gil leaned over and rubbed its ears. 

“She’s in town,” he said, trying uncharacteristically to fill the silence. “Should be back soon.”

“Should stay the hell away if she had any damn sense.” Moire stretched; the chain clanked and seized muscles strained and stretched. There was an ache down her ribs, and when she stretched out her calf, there was a gash there, scabbed but slowly oozing, the edges puffed and angry.

“Is it safe? To stitch?”

“Doubt it. Put that thing down and fetch a proper knife, sharp as we have. Yes, that’ll do it. Heat the blade, clean the wound, and then we’ll see about stitching.” She would see about the knife later. There was no point upsetting the child. Upsetting him more than trying to eat him had. Moire barked a humourless laugh. 

“It’ll hurt,” he said doubtfully.

“Of course it’ll hurt.” A little pain seemed warranted. More than a little. “I could’ve killed you then.”

Gil turned the knife in the fire, eyes intent upon the flames, the blade. “Didn’t.”

“I would have.”

“I could’ve killed you in the forest.”

“Didn’t know me then, did you?”

“Didn’t know me then, did you?” he parroted. 

Moire wasn’t sure that that was true. Had she? Had the wolf? Was there a difference? 

“You still don’t,” Gil said. His breath shuddered out of him, as harsh as it had when the wolf had tried to tear out his throat. “That’s not my- I’m not Gil. He’s dead, I think, he must be and - ”

A few months or a hundred years ago, Hobb had warned Moire that the gentry might come seeking for their own. “Then you’ve as much right to the name as anyone, and the same right to your secrets,” she said firmly, because ignorance might be the best protection she could offer. “Keep them.”

A long pause and then the boy nodded, relieved. Wordlessly, he handed her the half-emptied bottle of apple brandy and Moire downed it in one long, burning swallow. It did as much for the pain as the stick of kindling she bit near in half as he cut away the silver-burned flesh on her thigh, across her ribs, and then stitched the gashes closed. 

He was washing his hands in a bucket of well water and Moire was cursing and digging her nails into the floorboards when they heard the pound of feet upon the path and the door flew open to show Ilya, as bloody as the boy, and the second wolf at her heels. 

“Moire!” Ilya cried, and would have thrown herself at her if the boy hadn’t stepped into her path. Moire was grateful for that, didn’t want Ilya touching her and not only for the damage an embrace was likely to do to the stitches. 

“Moire,” she said, more calmly, dropping to her knees so that their faces were level. “We said the wolf was dead, and you were injured in the fight.”

“They’ll want some proof.”

“We gave it to them.” Ilya and the boy exchanged a glance that said far more than Moire could read. “We noticed- Werewolves heal so fast, we watched you come back together. And then we thought- We needed a fresh pelt, and we thought it wouldn’t hurt you- Well it would, but nothing that wouldn’t heal.”

“You took my skin?” Moire asked, in horrified admiration.

“Well, you’re fine now, aren’t you?” Ilya hesitated. “You _are_ well?”

“Olau isn’t, and Olau might not be the last.”

“I know you,” Ilya said with a sudden fury. “I know what you’re thinking, and I won’t have it.”

“It’s not your choice.”

“I’m your wife. I think I have some say in it. We’ll need more chains,” Ilya said, straightening up as though the matter was already decided. One of the boy’s wolf pups nudged its big head against her hip. “Perhaps that root cellar you’re always promising and have never quite managed to dig me.”

“ _Ilya_. A root cellar won’t fix that I almost ate the both of you.”

Ilya, as she so often did when they were fighting, ignored her entirely. “Why did it happen now?” she asked, relenting to pup’s insistent headbutting and rubbing his ears. “The wolf was years ago. I assume that’s what caused this?”

“Sometimes it’s like that,” Moire answered reluctantly. “Sometimes the infection’s slow to take hold.” Finding the boy in the woods, the fight, might have triggered something long dormant. Or maybe something else. Evenings in the Piper, watching Olau strut in with bloody knuckles and clenching her teeth against the fury. She'd spent her whole life killing monsters, after all. 

“And no cure?”

“No cure.”

“Well. A root cellar then. And that shackle will have to stay on until the moon’s properly waned. I may love you, but I don’t intend to be a fool about this.”

“You’re being a fool every moment I’m alive,” Moire told her. But Ilya was looking at her with the same patient look she gave Moire when Moire argued with her over how to season trout or whether it was time to move the privy. Why had Moire chosen to love someone so damned implacable? 

This time, when Ilya leaned forwards, the boy stood aside, and Moire let her wife fold her arms around her. The iron haze of Moire’s blood still surrounded her, and it did send jabs of pain through Moire’s ribs, but Moire hugged her back, hugged her as tightly as she dared. 

“Well,” Moire said, with a cough that jabbed harder at her ribs, meeting the boy’s eyes over Ilya’s shoulder. “I suppose we’re even now. If you want - ” she coughed again and winced. “I can’t promise you’ll be safe here. I can’t promise much of anything, but I’ll not keep you trapped here with a monster.”

The boy looked at her, and Ilya, and the splintered, blood-splattered mess they’d made of the cottage and said nothing. One of the pups whined and rested its too-heavy head on Moire’s shoulder. 

* * *

The wolf didn’t come again that night, or the nights that followed after. The moon waned thin and pale and took the beast with it, even as Moire waited, unsleeping, watchful as she’d ever been upon a hunt. 

And Ilya watched Moire, her face crumpled with worry. 

A shackle would not be enough. Nor a cellar, nor Ilya’s love, however great. 

Moire was good at killing monsters, and at knowing when to kill and when to hold the blow. She slipped from her bed, bare feet cold on the floorboards. Ilya grumbled in her sleep and rolled into the warm patch Moire had left behind. It was a cruel thing that Moire did to her, but she’d done crueller.

Beside the hearth, Gil’s pile of blankets didn’t so much as stir as Moire stalked past. 

It had itched at her, like holding a handful of stinging nettles even sheathed, but Moire had put the silver knife to rest in her chest of fangs and poison. Now, with cramping, careful fingers, she eased off the lid and reached into its musty depths. Bottles chimed softly to each other and shed lamia scale rustled like dead leaves, but the stiff leather of the hilt eluded her. 

The knife was gone. 

Moire turned and saw the stillness of the room did not come from sleep. The mound of fur-flecked blankets was cold and long empty. 

Stumbling in the dark, Moire sprinted for the door, slid the latch and let the wind throw it open onto the green-specked slush of spring and the prick of dawn at the edges of the sky. 

There was something in the woods. Movement at the treeline, the firefly flicker of three pairs of eyes. 

And then there was nothing.


End file.
